The recent recognitions of a Palestinian state and the October 10 ceasefire have been followed by a flurry of calls to “deradicalize” Palestinian society. The New York Times editorial board went so far as to compare this deradicalization project to the denazification of Germany after the Second World War. These calls have the situation backwards to the point of farce.
I dunno. There’s a lot you can say about the jews, but I don’t really think they were trying to create a zionist state inside Germany in the 1930’s…
Ever since the 1920’s both zionists and muslim arab-nationalists have been duking it out over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire to carve out their own country.
There were a lot of states created from the Ottoman Empire. Most of those borders were carved along ethnic and religious lines and spoiler alert: they weren’t decided through peace and friendship.
It’s interesting to see how people would compare Israel’s guilt to that of, say, Turkey. The latter put a genocide on 1,5 million Armenians to carve out their territory. There’s a bit of irony to be found when people argue that Israel shouldn’t exist because there’s conflict. Had they followed the Turks’ example back in '48, the memory of their sins would have started fading into history the very next day.
And if you have paid attention, there are quite few voices there as well to officially recognize it as a genocide. It’s also rather important to add the bit where this happened before the word genocide existed. Lastly, if we go back far enough in history we’ll find dozens of examples that would have been genocides but again, we didn’t really have that concept setup until after WWII. From the Wikipedia article on genocide
Also I made the argument that Israel perhaps shouldn’t exist because it has been an agressor from pretty much day one and it has continued this to the point where there is a clear pattern of aggression. Though the Turks, to continue your example, suppress the Kurds, I haven’t seen turkey attack nearly all of its neighbors, and they have definitely not committed genocide in the past 50 years
Israel, on the other side, has been in countless wars with countless countries. It executed (understandable but still) extrajudicial executions, it has subjugated Palestinians to the worst atrocities seen since WWII for over 5 decades now. Hell, they’ve been funding terrorists (Hamas) just so they could continue murdering innocent Palestinian with a flimsy excuse. They regularly let “settlers” (nice euphemism there) steal Palestinian houses and land, and if Palestinians resisted even the slightest bit, they’d be murdered without repercussions. For decades.
I’d argue that there is a clear structural pattern of aggression and violence from this state, hence the question: should this state continue to exist? Because if it does so in its current form, I guarantee you that the middle east will never find peace.
Then, Palestinians aren’t trying to create a state within Israel. They had their lands, were driven off of it, Hardee’s in small areas which are the places they’d like to have their independent state with Israel being a neighbor.
And yeah, the way that the middle east was carved up was asking for trouble, because of course it was. That, however, doesn’t excuse anything that Israel is doing today nor anything of what it has been doing for decades.
Well that’s my point, innit?
You don’t hold that against Turkey as much, even though they murdered more than ten times as many innocent people because, well, “it’s been a while now”.
If Israel had just murdered all of the muslim Palestinian population in '48, you’d say they were better than Turkey.